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> I would
> restate this to say that the TW has to be able to look
> at the product from the user's point of view, with no
> preconceived notions of what will or should happen.
The fly in the ointment here is that every novice is different. You will, in
fact, bring preconceived notions of what will or should happen. Everyone
does. And everybody brings different ones.
Ever seen an army film? At the beginning all the recruits are different.
None of them are good soldiers, but they are all bad soldiers in completely
different ways. There is the rebel, the coward, the fat guy, the dumb guy,
the broken hearted guy, the gambler, the cad, and the loser. At the end,
they are all good soldiers. They know their trade and they can all perform
the same task with the same skill.
In any given field the experts are alike, at least in the area of their
expertise, but the novices are all different. Each has his own battle to
fight and his own demons to conquer. Being one of those novices does not
give you very much of an insight into the mind and psyche of any of the
other novices. In fact, your own experiences as a novice may blind you to
the difficulties that other people are having. Your experience is too
personal and too individual. It was not until I became a teacher, for
instance, that I understood that other people learned differently from the
way I did.
The guy who does understand the mind of the novice is the old drill sergeant
who has fought a dozen battles and trained a thousand grunts. Of course, he
was once a raw recruit himself, and that memory is still with him and helps
perhaps to give him some sympathy for the soldiers he is training. But far
more important is his years of real field experience, and the experience of
knowing and training so many different individuals over the years.
At the end of the movie, when the shooting starts, you want to be in the
platoon that was trained by Clint Eastwood. Those guys are coming home
alive.
